Jenni prepares for the pole beans

JUNE 27, 2004

The Waiting Game

This year, July is the month we wait out.

Failures and missteps compound each other like a freeway pileup. Continuous rains are keeping our garden from looking its best. Our tomatoes have floundered; thankfully, we only intended to grow those for ourselves, so had limited our investment to a dozen or so plants. Our okra has only begun to shoot up from the seedling stage in the past few weeks, making it look likely that we will be waiting until late July for its fruiting, compared to the first of the month last year. So much rain has also made mulching a dim prospect, since a good mulch traps more water in the soil, and the rain has encouraged such an intense growth of pasture grass that the bottom half of the garden is now more of a lawn with plants. Last week, I pulled up all of our drip irrigation lines to hack at it with a little rental tiller, but couldn't uproot the grass and ended up pulling out the push mower instead. In theory, the grass has helped keep the bottom half of the garden from turning into a swamp; we wish, though, that we had taken the time to put up raised rows, like we did last year, which might have helped the plants stay above the moisture a bit, and that we had at least been able to keep our melon patch weed-free, as the plants are still quite small and are running out of time. All around, it has been a year of mistakes, missed opportunities, and bad luck in our garden. I hope we can get some okra out of it, perhaps a little corn and a few peppers, and that it does not arrive so late that the other vendors, and thus the customers, have abandoned the farmer's market for the summer.

The curse of failure in farming is that there is always something one could have done better, or at least made a different guess at and gone down a different path, and it is difficult, but very important, to sort through the errors one has made and the hand one has been dealt and soberly assess the difference between the two, in the face of that failure. Suffice to say that next year we plan to do things very differently. We are talking now about permanent beds, costly mulches, black plastic between our rows, and soil tests. If conditions are right in the fall, we will plant a cover crop, and in the spring we will do things on a smaller and more intensive scale.

What we are really waiting for, though, is the arrival of our first child. Jenni is now nearing eight months pregnant, the baby is very active, and she has gained only 21 pounds, but is carrying 95% of it in her belly. Proportionally, then, she looks "about ready to pop," as many people tell her, but with five weeks to go we are waiting to see just how much bigger she can possibly get. Carrying around that weight is beginning to put a strain on her back, and she has reached the point where no sleeping, sitting or standing position is truly comfortable.

In the meantime, we are moving forward with the responsibilities attendant to Jenni's upcoming show. Twenty-three prints will need to be framed, and although the gallery is handling the production of a promotional postcard, we are putting together a website that will feature all of the work Jenni currently has for sale, an archive reaching back several years but focused on her work of the last year or two. We spent virtually an entire weekend scanning negatives, and still have a ways to go on that, as well as on the site's design, new business cards, a CD-ROM Of her recent work, and ancillary promotional materials that we will mail out to other galleries during the show's run. We are looking forward to a two-week visit from my parents in late August, and have just learned that Jenni's opening date has been pushed forward to a date when they will likely still be here.

In short, there are plenty of positive developments to offset our unimpressive garden, and the lack of success does not sting us as it might in another year. Meanwhile, we are learning from our mistakes. Committing errors on this scale and returning to the task next year is a luxury many small farmers do not have, and we are fortunate not to be making our living from the land just yet.